Dutch school district chooses Barracuda to help it comply with tough new standards

In the U.S., the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) has, since its passage in 2000, mandated all schools that receive federal E-rate funding to comply with strict requirements for protecting students against harmful content and online threats, among other things.

In The Netherlands, a similar mandatory security framework—the Normenkader Funderend Onderwijs (NFO)—goes into effect in 2027. In order to prepare for this, as well as to protect students from online threats, school IT professionals like Pieter Klijs, ICT Manager at CVO Rotterdam e.o., are already taking steps to ensure they have technical solutions in place that will help them comply with the new regulations. Get the full case study.

Beginning with backup

After migrating his school district to Microsoft 365, Klijs soon realized that he needed a more capable backup solution than the very basic native data retention features. He chose Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup. 

“We love the ease of use. It does what it has to do, and when we have to restore we can easily find what has been deleted. I also like the fact that we don’t have to restore from the same point at which we backed up.”— Pieter Klijs, ICT Manager, CVO Rotterdam e.o.

On to comprehensive security

That same ease of use was a major factor in Klijs and his team’s later decision—with the help of technology reseller SLBdiensten—to implement the complete Barracuda Email Protection platform in order to support their efforts to ensure compliance with the NFO requirements for cyber-risk management and continuous improvement. 

“We looked at a number of different phishing awareness tools, but standardization is very important for us, and we didn’t want to accrue a large number of different point solutions within our organization. … Using the Barracuda portal is very natural. We were already using it for backup, so it’s easy to operate and we can see everything that’s happening in there.”— Pieter Klijs, ICT Manager, CVO Rotterdam e.o.

So far Klijs and his team have been using the platform’s email filtering, AI-powered phishing and BEC protection, and automated incident response capabilities, and they’re delighted with those features.

Although he knows it won’t happen overnight, Klijs is looking forward to also begin using the security-awareness training module and cloud message archiving capabilities. 

“Many smaller schools don’t have the time or staff to do everything themselves with Microsoft tools, but Barracuda helps a lot. It’s important to have a partner like Barracuda to get these schools up to speed.” — Pieter Oosterhof, License Manager, SLBdiensten

“It will take a long time to reach the required maturity level. But Barracuda is an important piece in the puzzle.”— Pieter Klijs, ICT Manager, CVO Rotterdam e.o.

To get the whole story of CVO Rotterdam e.o.’s ongoing partnership with Barracuda, get the full case study here.